


Not A Story

by bomberqueen17



Category: Fall of Ile-Rien - Martha Wells, The Death of the Necromancer - Martha Wells, WELLS Martha - Works
Genre: Between Books, Gen, but let's be real if you're reading this you already knew that, emotionally frozen master criminal, father/daughter issues, i guess it's spoilery to say arisilde is in this, i just wanted to spend a little more time with them and think about it, it's not that deep, things i found on my hard drive while looking for other things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-18 09:02:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14209752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: Shortly pre-Ile Rien trilogy: Tremaine has some realizations about using life for art, among other things.





	Not A Story

 Tremaine had been completely immersed in her work for most of the day, getting up from her seat at the table in the library only to get more cups of tea and to wander around the room for a few minutes, muttering to herself and gesticulating as she worked out the action sequences. She had nearly finished the fifth installment of the serial. She knew this one would sell. It was all high adventure, and she felt it was her most inspired work to date.

And so she was entirely unprepared for the knock at the door, just as she was deciding she had to eat something. She detoured from the kitchen hall, wondering who it could possibly be. She wasn't expecting anyone. "Who is it?" she shouted, trying to be heard through the thick wood and iron of the door.

"Gerard," came the answer, and she paused. Gerard. Guilliame Gerard was a friend of her father's, and she knew and liked him but couldn't think of any reason he would come to visit. He worked at the Institute, and she had been sure that was where Nicholas had gone yesterday-- though, with him, one never knew. She was pretty sure he hadn't come home in the interim, so if he was somewhere else, he'd gone there directly.

She opened the door, saying, "Nicholas isn't here, Gerard. I thought he was with--" but then she caught sight of Gerard's face, which was white and shocked, and knew something was wrong. "Oh God," she said. Then, bravely, she continued, "What's happened?"

Gerard stepped into the doorway, and she let him in, closing the door behind him. He put a hand to his face, as if composing himself, or finding the strength to speak. His hand shook. Tremaine leaned against the door, watching him in dread. _Whatever it is_ , she thought, _if he doesn't say it, will it not have happened? Could I go back to how I was before?_ She almost opened her mouth to ask him not to tell her, but then remembered, this was the real world, not a story, and things actually happened here, and she couldn't just edit them out.

 "Gerard," she said softly, "please tell me what it is."

He turned and looked at her. "I'm sorry," he said. "Tremaine, it-- there was-- something happened today, and I don't entirely know how to explain it. But we can't-- We're not sure, but it seems like--"

He hesitated too long. "Please," Tremaine said, "what is it." Nicholas was dead, surely. Gerard wouldn't have come, looking like this, for anything less. But if Nicholas was dead, then Arisilde should-- well, it wasn't reasonable to expect anything of Arisilde, who at his best was terribly unstable, and without Nicholas, would probably be unmanageable. "My father is dead?"

Gerard swallowed, took a deep breath, and, to her considerable dismay, nodded. His jaw shook. "Nicholas and, and Arisilde, they-- they did an experiment, and we don't know what they did, but they vanished, both of them, and none of us can track them. It seems-- it seems they--" He shook his head, unable to continue.

"They must be dead," Tremaine said. She considered that. "Do you have any idea what they were trying to do?"

"Nicholas never took notes," Gerard said bleakly. "And Arisilde, well, even if he did, none of us could understand them. There's no, we just, we don't know."

"You do know it's never wise to assume that my father is actually dead, no matter how compelling the evidence," Tremaine said. It was a little strange, she thought, how calm she was. If she were writing this scene, she'd have to do something to make her character a bit more convicing.

Well, she thought in a moment, it was a good thing she wasn't writing this scene.

"We just don't understand," Gerard said, and his voice shook. "But it's not-- I-- It seems to me that they were destroyed by the spell. Riardin was most informed of what was going on and from what he can determine, the spell must have just... vaporized both of them. They were working with some kind of magical object... We think they had a Villier sphere. God, we don't even know _that_."

"When did this happen?" Tremaine asked casually.

Gerard shook his head. "Last night, apparently," he said. "I, we, we waited to tell you, until we were as sure as we could be of what had happened."

Tremaine thought this over. _My father has been dead for nearly a day_ , she thought, waiting to feel something. "Arisilde too?" she asked finally, thinking of him, his sweet intense vagueness. She should be writing this down, she thought, to use it in a story, for versimilitude. The protagonist finding out about the death of her father. What did she feel?

Well, nothing, that was sort of the problem. But she was beginning to feel a weird little shaky shock at the thought of Arisilde. Uncle Ari. Who had never been quite all there, and now, well, "Oh my," she said. Gerard had said something and she hadn't caught it. "Did you say yes?"

"Yes," Gerard said softly. "Yes, Tremaine. They were together."

Tremaine drew breath. A character in a play or a story would now droop her head a little, say brokenly, 'At least they were together... at the end...' or something to that effect, and fall into Gerard's arms to be comforted. She nodded. Yes, that would probably be a good reaction for a character to have. An audience would believe that. After all, Nicholas and Arisilde had been friends at least since they were teenagers, which was a very long time ago now. That would have to have been already mentioned somewhere, however. It would detract from the effect to have the grieving protagonist gasp out all that information. She considered it. No, this would be a terrible opening scene. Too much backstory, without which it was meaningless.

"Tremaine?" Gerard asked.

"Hmm?" She looked up. "Oh. Well." She nodded. "I, ah..." Oh right. She herself hadn't reacted at all. Well. What ought one to do? She didn't know, at the moment. "Um, perhaps we should have a drink," she said. "You look upset, Gerard. Come and have a seat."

"Are you all right?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I really don't know, Gerard," she said. "I just don't."

 

After a glass of wine (the rest of the bottle of which Gerard drank) she put Gerard to bed in the guest-bedroom he'd always stayed in, and went back to the library. She had expected to get back to work after she ate something-- oh, right, she'd forgotten about the food, but, well, she wasn't hungry-- but she didn't find the prospect as appealing as she had earlier. Tomorrow, then. She'd leave it for now. She turned out the light and went down the hall toward her own bedroom, but paused at the door, looking across the hall at Nicholas's bedroom door.

She didn't consciously decide to go to it, but when she found her hand on the doorknob, she opened it and went in, turning on the light switch. He never turned that light on, she thought. Normally she wouldn't go in here without a reason, expecting that he'd know she'd been there and would take it as some sort of challenge.

She closed the door behind herself and stood looking around. It wasn't exactly tidy. Clothes were piled at the foot of the bed. Books were piled on the night-stand. Things he'd been working on. Of course there wouldn't be so much as a scrap of paper, a snippet of handwriting. He probably wouldn't even have the corners of the pages folded down-- or if he did, he'd've folded down some irrelevant corners too, just to throw anyone off the trail. In a story, the protagonist would here discover some highly relevant thing, a note perhaps. Perhaps a love-note to her mother, that would be romantic, that showed some of the emotion Nicholas had never shown his own daughter.

Except she was pretty sure he'd never really felt very much emotion, toward her or anyone. She knew academically he'd been fond of her mother, but so much of that was simply inference, and so little was actual observation, that she couldn't think of a single illustrative scene to flash dramatically back to.

She went and sat on the bed. The sheets were fairly clean. She lay down. The pillow barely even smelled of him. A little, but not much, and it was mostly camoflaged by soap. She'd slept here, once or twice since her mother died, driven in by nightmares, but for the most part he simply hadn't been available, and the episodes she was old enough to remember clearly, he'd considered her old enough to be talked out of irrational fears. That had always worked simply swimmingly, the result being that she had far more numerous and vivid memories of being comforted by Arisilde. Whatever else one might say of Arisilde, he'd never judged her poorly for being illogical.

She sat up. This was unsatisfying. There should be some kind of... She should find his private diaries here, in which he'd confided something highly emotionally fulfilling. But she knew that was as unlikely as herself growing wings and flying out the window. He didn't write things down. He never wrote down anything personal. He'd never really had feelings anyway. She looked over at the little desk in the corner, and thought about going through it, but knew it would be pointless and fairly stupid. Also there were undoubtedly magical wards on the desk, if it did have anything remotely interesting in it, and if she blundered into one she was likely to be embarrassingly injured. It wouldn't do at all.

Oh God. His people would be showing up, the ones that ran things for him. They'd come by and expect her to know things. Vital things. Of course she didn't know them. Nicholas had never told her anything he didn't feel he had to. Oh God. Well, maybe Gerard would stick around. He undoubtedly knew more of this sort of thing.

Surely she would be expected now to think something melodramatic about her mother. How she and Nicholas could finally be reunited. But Tremaine rejected that thought outright. It was too melodramatic even for a high drama. The very idea was enough to make one gag.

But dammit, she thought. The old bastard was dead. She couldn't weep or wail or gnash her teeth or tear her hair; she was sure he wouldn't appreciate the gesture, and she couldn't summon the motivation anyhow. Would he have cried for her? She considered it. Unlikely; she didn't know that Nicholas had ever cried in his life. Perhaps if she'd seen him mourn her mother, but he'd never really spoken about it to her, except in odd little offhand asides now and then. _Emotionally frozen_ was the best descriptor she'd ever found for him. But it wasn't that he'd never had emotions, he'd just learned never to express them. She'd gone through a phase where she had devoted a great deal of time and effort to getting Nicholas to have apparent emotions. It had never worked out well for her, and her experiments had mostly yielded the rather unrewarding emotions of irritation and sarcasm, which she had already known were there. But she had gotten him to admit to a few others, like worry and fear, and on one or two occasions she'd realized that he must love her. Obviously he had a fairly strong sense of duty and obligation, but he had shown vague signs of finding her company pleasurable in ways that went beyond the dubious joys of her conversation. He did care for her, and had admitted as much during a lecture on being unconventional. And there was no explanation besides obligation and concern for all the time he'd spent teaching her things he felt important, that she'd found not particularly interesting.

No, he'd loved her. And for her part, she'd loved him. He worked in indirect ways, revealing hints of implied emotion. He'd once sternly told her that it was only the expectations of others that had her convinced she needed outward displays of affection, or even that she needed someone's love or approval at all, and had gone on to explain how he'd survived extended periods while no one in the world cared whether he were alive. She'd lost the argument, and had gone off in a fury. But then for the next month she'd found things left in strange places for her, places he would only know she was if he'd been paying close attention to her for a very long time. Things she'd wanted and never asked for.

She got up from the bed and went out, closing the door carefully behind her. She padded down the hall to Arisilde's room. Normally his room tingled with little bits of magic, barely perceptible except as a little hum in the background, but it was cold and silent. She let herself in, moving amidst the clutter with the ease of long practice. There was nothing here, no feeling like he was half-listening from somewhere else. She left suddenly, cold and shaken, and went into her room.

Even her room seemed cold and dead. She wondered if all along Arisilde had been keeping some kind of ward or listening or watching device going in here, because it felt different. But perhaps it was simply that she was different. Part of her was dead, in these two men. This was not the first time she'd felt this way. She felt burdened, suddenly. Now her family was dead, her last remaining kin, and she was the only one who knew them. She had to carry the burden of their memories alone. There were so many things she'd never known, had never asked, and now no one knew them at all; and so many other things, she was the only remaining witness, the only one who had been in on the joke, and she had only ever been peripherally involved.

The fact that Nicholas had preferred it that way and would be grimly satisfied to know that no one could ever reveal the truth was little consolation.

 

She went to her bedside table and opened the drawer, fishing around in it. In a moment her fingers brushed metal, and she drew back in surprise: it was warm, almost hot. She pulled the drawer further out, and there was the sphere, nestled in among a set of rag curlers. She picked it up gingerly, feeling the unexpected heat: it was warmer than her skin. But no lights moved in it, no gears whirred. It was as if it were dead.

She sat on her bed to look at it in worry. Arisilde had made it. He'd given it to her several years ago. She'd used it to play little games. She knew it was a powerful thing, had treasured it for its being so very special and had shown it to almost no one. Nicholas had told her to keep it locked up in the attic. But she hadn't wanted to.

Surely it wouldn't have died when Arisilde did. Other spheres had outlived their creators. Hadn't they?

She shook it, but it didn't respond.

She lay down on the bed, suddenly despairing, and curled around it, holding it to her chest. Was even this going to die, then? She knew it was only a toy, to her, and she was not a child, to need toys. She closed her eyes and tried to make the sphere make a fayre light. Nothing flickered beyond her eyelids, and she opened her eyes to regard the cold dark room.

It was stupid that this was finally what brought tears to her eyes. She sat up impatiently, wiping them away. Her father was dead, and the man who had raised her, her uncle, and she was crying because her toy was broken.

But it wasn't a toy, it had been a gift from Arisilde, and it was the only really truly special thing she'd had, and it had had a bit of him in it, and now it was gone. She couldn't stop herself, and sat holding it for a little while, crying silently.

 

She woke to light beyond her eyelids. It was hard to open them; they were swollen and her eyes were dry and sore. She pushed herself up on her elbow. The light was from the window. She hadn't pulled the curtains. It was morning. She felt beside herself, remembering she'd been holding the sphere. Remembering that her father was dead, and Uncle Ari. The sphere wasn't there. She sat up, cursing absently. She'd slept in her clothes. Great, she'd cried herself to sleep over a toy and still hadn't cried for her own father. Who wouldn't have minded a bit, but it still seemed wrong. And where was the sphere?

She found it on the floor tangled in the blanket she'd apparently knocked off the bed. It fell out and rolled across the floor, and she had to stumble after it. She picked it up and looked sadly into it, giving it a little shake.

A tiny blue spark moved somewhere inside it, then died.

"You're not dead," she said, astonishing herself with her voice's harsh croak. She sat on the bed and looked at it again, for a long couple of moments. Nothing.

There was a faint knock on the door. Probably Gerard. She stood and shuffled to the door stiffly, and opened it. Yes, Gerard. He looked awful, his face swollen and his eyes puffy and his hair sticking up. He'd slept in his clothes too. Unsurprising. "Tremaine?" he said.

She opened the door all the way. "You look a treat," she said. "I think we need breakfast."

"Could you eat?" Gerard asked.

"A girl has to," she said grimly. But she relented, he looked so upset, and put her arm around him to embrace him.

He jerked back with a start, and she blinked in confusion until she noticed him rubbing his chest in alarm, and realized the sphere had touched him. "What the," he said.

She held it up. "Ari's sphere," she said. "It's not dead. I thought it was, last night."

"That's not--" Gerard peered closer at it.

"It's an old one," she said. "He gave it to me years ago. It's not the one he was using."

"He did have another one, then," Gerard said vaguely. He put his arm around her shoulder and leaned his cheek against her head. She wasn't sure what he meant, so she didn't pursue it. She felt the little tingle of magic from the sphere and pulled it close to cradle it in her arm. At least she had this much left of Arisilde. Nothing remained of Nicholas except her vague resemblance to him.

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly do not know what year I wrote this in or whether it's ever been posted anywhere before. I'm going to guess 2008 or so but who knows. It was in a scrap file, copied and pasted from somewhere else, several computers ago.
> 
> There's more, which I might clean up and post, but there's not a lot more. Still. If it breaks the posting drought.


End file.
